


i wait for you (like a empty house)

by ghostwriterofthemachine



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epistolary, Grief/Mourning, Literary References & Allusions, Loneliness, Long-Distance Relationship, Love at First Sight, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multimedia, Poet Anakin Skywalker, Poet Obi-Wan Kenobi, Poetry, Pop Culture, Professor Obi-Wan Kenobi, Referenced past child abuse, Romance, Slow Burn, Social Media, Texting, but somehow also, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 14,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28134207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwriterofthemachine/pseuds/ghostwriterofthemachine
Summary: until then, my windows ache.This is a story about love.“What if we pretend that we're Keats and Fanny Brawne. Or Ginsberg and Orlovsky. Or Dunne and Didion. And we write each other letters. And we keep in touch like that for a year. And then—”
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 173
Kudos: 161





	1. September

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loosingletters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loosingletters/gifts).



> "Ghostwriter," you say to me, staring at this fic, "you never write romance. And this isn't usually your pairing of choice. And you've never done a multimedia fic. And don't you usually write worldbuilding and heavy whump? What?"
> 
> Behold, I say to that. The most self-indulgent thing I have ever written. Prepare for poetry, pop culture references, and me being as Fake Deep on Main as I want. This is all Eli's fault, as he's been shamelessly enabling it for months. 
> 
> This fic is about 80% written already. There will be 13 chapters. 
> 
> Title from Pablo Neruda's Sonnet LXV

“Listen, Kenobi. I am putting my foot down. You are coming to Outlander tonight. I’m picking you up in an hour.”

Obi-Wan took a moment to stare at his phone and blink at it, as if that could perhaps turn back time to before the voice on the other end said that. No such luck. He sighed with the phone away from his mouth, so the person on the other side couldn’t hear him, and then put it up to his ear to speak so he could. 

“Quin,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m feeling up to it—”

_“Obi-Wan,”_ Quinlan leaned into the words this time, over-exaggeratedly chiding the way he only ever was when he was worried. “You’ve barely been out since you got back here. I’ve seen you _once_ . Christ, Obi-Wan, you’re here to live in that house, not _haunt_ it.”

Obi-Wan looked around the kitchen — the scuffed up table and the loudly patterned curtains, all very aggressively Qui-Gon’s taste. _‘What’s the difference?’_ he thought to himself. 

And then he paused, because that particular thought was maudlin, even for him, even considering the kind of mindset he’d been stuck in recently. Obi-Wan ran a hand over his eyes. 

“What’s going on at Outlander?” he asked.

Quin was silent for a long beat on the other end of the line. Any other time, Obi-Wan would have been somewhat triumphant for striking him dumb. “Uh,” he said, “an open mic night. Readings and some music, but mostly readings, I think. Musicians usually stick to the Wednesday coffee houses.”

“Alright.”

“...You’re serious?”

“Yes, Quin, I’m serious. I’ll come. You said you’d pick me up in an hour?”

“Holy shit,” said Quinlan, “I had a whole spiel planned out to convince you. I cannot believe you caved that quickly.”

Obi-Wan found the corners of his mouth twitching up, just slightly. “I aim to surprise,” he said. “See you in an hour?”

“Hell yeah. I’ll see you then.” And then Quinlan hung up, with his usual flair for the abrupt. Obi-Wan sighed and brought the phone down from his ear. He slipped it into his pocket. 

He looked around the kitchen again, its strange half-familiarity mocking him. The whole house was too quiet. 

Maybe going out was the best thing. 

Obi-Wan made his way to the bedroom. A few suitcases still sat against the far wall, half unpacked, despite the near-month he’d spent living here already. He glanced in the mirror. He looked— rumpled. Tired, with dark bags under his eyes. Like he needed a fresh shirt, and to brush his hair, before he was presentable to anyone. 

He set about doing just that, as well as tossing his messenger bag on the bed to take with him later. 

Moving back here wasn’t supposed to be easy, because nothing about the last several months had been easy, but it was supposed to make him feel better. It was supposed to anchor him, let him feel a connection to both Qui-Gon and the time they lived here. Instead, it felt smothering. Obi-Wan felt trapped. 

He’d cried just as much the week he moved in as he had in the week leading up to the funeral. 

Obi-Wan placed the comb down on the dresser with a _click_. The man in the mirror looked slightly more ready to face the world than Obi-Wan felt. Maybe some tea before he left would do him good— something to make him feel more awake. As if he’d felt anything but half-asleep for more time than he cared to think about. 

His eyes floated to a desk in the corner of the bedroom— the most put-together and unpacked space in the house. A closed laptop, pushed the back of it. Some scattered fliers he was workshopping for new events at the arts council, pages of old syllabuses he had annotated to figure out how to make his own, and hadn’t gotten away to filing yet. And his notebook, open to a mostly-blank page, still untouched after too much time. 

Obi-Wan walked over to it, ran his fingers over the paper. Written on the top of the page was one line. He’d read it too many times. He didn’t want to read it again. It was the only thing he’d been able to write for weeks. 

He knew the reason he couldn’t write anything more than that, of course. But that creative block, on top of everything else that was going on, on top of all the feelings being back here brought up, certainly wasn’t helping anything. 

So, thought Obi-Wan, an open mic night. A poetry reading. Getting to be around other artists again, see what new material friends and colleagues had created, listen to people who loved words speak them. Get out of this stuffy house that cried with its emptiness. Maybe Quinlan was right. Maybe that would be the solution.

After a moment’s hesitation, he closed the notebook on the desk. He picked it up and slipped it into his messenger bag, and took it with him as he went to wait for Quin.

.

  
  


The Outlander Taproom was a place with warm lighting and local art on the walls. It was popular with the artist crowd in the area, and they leaned into that as much as they could. Open mic nights and discussion circles and coffee houses happened weekly, and the owner of the establishment was one of the first people Obi-Wan had been put in contact with when he took the position at the arts council. 

Quin— who was literally shining from a glitter-infused hand lotion he was currently trying, and spent a chunk of the ride over telling Obi-Wan about — steered him immediately into a group of old friends and new colleagues, who were fast becoming friends— Mace and Depa and Luminara. They greeted him warmly, and as if he was liable to bolt at any moment. Which, given his social life the past few months, was a fair assumption. 

The floor was fairly full. There was a small stage set up on the far side with a microphone. 

Time passed. Obi-Wan breathed, aware of the sound in the room, aware of the warmth of Quin at his elbow. 

Chat turned to work things— the new outreach activities Obi-Wan was putting in place, as well as the department drama which was already brewing at the college. Mace was in talks with a small university press to put out his short story collection. Depa was trying to get a local artist to come in a run an acrylic workshop for their under-12s. 

Obi-Wan leaned his face against his hand and listened. He ran his finger over the rim of his glass. The open mic started. 

The first few readers were undergraduate students at the university— shaky voices and unpolished words, but Obi-Wan clapped as hard as he could for all of them. Quin bounced up, read a new piece he was working on, all razor-sharp irony and biting images. Some others, blurring together.

And then a blonde man Obi-Wan had never seen before stepped up onto the stage. 

He settled himself down in front of the microphone. Square at his shoulders and narrow at his waist, long-limbed and defined cheekbones. His hair was longer, fell almost to his shoulders, and was pulled back from his face with a headband made of braided cloth. 

And Obi-Wan Kenobi proved himself a living cliché because, as soon as he saw the man, his mind skipped a like a scratched record and spun, “ _and there stands the tower/they say God carved out of marble./I think he kisses his work, when he is finished—_ ”

Obi-Wan commanded himself to shut up. He did not, however, command himself to stop looking. The part of himself that was always standing away from himself, always observing, noted that this is the first time since Qui-Gon died that he noticed someone in that way. Noticed the aesthetic beauty of another person. 

Goodness. Obi-Wan blinked, and looked around the room again. Saw it again, as if for the first time. Grief did that, and he hadn’t even noticed. It took away his ability to see beauty. 

And, it seemed, one glance at the poet on the stage had renewed it, at least for a moment. 

And what a revelation it was to see it again. The room seemed brighter. The people seemed more friendly. Obi-Wan let his eyes wander, allowed himself a moment to bask in the feeling, because he knew it wouldn't last. He soaked in the loveliness of the room. Felt something dormant in the back of his mind twitch. Composition. Little flicks of poetry, on the lips of strangers.

And then the man on the stage opened his mouth and started to read, and Obi-Wan was lost.

_“I used to huff the smoke_

_off the buildings my stepfather burned._

_As I did, he told me love was coughing lighter fluid onto cigarettes._

_Instead of arson, he called this Manhood._

_He said the two words as if they meant two different things_

_and gave me firecrackers for my next birthday.”_

The poet on stage projected this in a smooth, pleasing tenor, oddly light. Ringing with power. Obi-Wan couldn’t take his eyes off of him. 

The poet inhaled and continued reading. He had a spiral-bound notebook held in front of him, reading off of it. His fingers were long and thin. 

“Who,” asked Obi-Wan, oddly breathless, “who _is_ that?”

He didn’t see Mace, Quin, and Depa exchange a Look over his head, but he sort of felt it in his soul anyway. 

“His name’s Anakin Skywalker,” said Mace. “Local author, but he travels a lot. Does workshops for kids in schools. Big into activism, and he’s good at it.”

“Oh,” said Obi-Wan faintly. “I see.”

The beauty that was suddenly back in the world again, after seeing the man in the warm light of the bar, surged into his bloodstream. And the words — resonated, in the way poetry, or music, or a beautiful view did sometimes. Each word the man spoke intensified it. He finished the first poem and read another, just as good. When he left the stage, Obi-Wan’s eyes followed him back to his seat. 

For the first time in months, since the night he got the call from the hospital, Obi-Wan’s fingertips itched. Slowly, he reached into his bag and pulled out his notebook, placing it on the table. He flipped past the page with the single line written at the top, and started to pull the pen across the page.

When he glanced up, Quinlan was smiling at him. “Are you feeling better?” he asked. 

“I’m— I’m glad I got out of the house,” Obi-Wan settled on, and his smile came easier this time. 

“Wonderful!” Quin slapped him on the back. “Depa, you should go sign him up to read!”

“Wha—” Obi-Wan spluttered, “Quin, I don’t have anything new, I—” 

“Doesn’t have to be new,” Quin said. “There’s new _people_ here, so you can read old poetry. Best way to reintroduce yourself, right? Put your best foot forward.”

Depa was already standing up and moving to the bartender who was running the sign-up list. 

“I am being bullied like a schoolboy,” Obi-Wan said, with an exaggerated roll of his eyes, but he was already flipping through older pages of this notebook, looking for something that was finished. If the beauty would be gone from the world again tomorrow, he would take advantage of it today.

A few more people read, before Obi-Wan heard his name called. Quin all but catapulted him out of the booth they were sitting in, and Obi-Wan took a moment to glare with no heat behind it. He walked to the microphone. 

He felt the eyes of the blond man— Anakin, Mace had called him Anakin — on the back of his neck. 

Obi-Wan got himself settled, and then cleared his throat. He felt Anakin Skywalker’s eyes on him. He began to read. 

_“Balm to the sting of summer's burn_

_tapped my cheek on a cool breeze._

_I turned my face towards in_

_and let it fall into my hands.  
_

_I have long-learned to hold the seasons_

_within my cupped palms like pooling chains—_

_I want to spin as time spins._

_I want only that chain to connect me_

_between the here and the not-here. Place and next-place._

_Who doesn’t fear losing things?”_

This was an unfinished piece, but one he was fond of. One he was looking forward to revising more, when he felt up to it.

He felt Anakin Skywalker’s eyes on him the whole time. 

.

Obi-Wan expected Skywalker to fade into the background of his mind, a memory of the evocation of emotion and nothing more. But, maybe 10 minutes after he read, on his way to the bar, somebody caught his arm. He turned, and found himself looking directly into the man’s face. 

“Oh,” said Obi-Wan. “Hello.”

“Hi,” said Anakin Skywalker. Up close, his eyes were a startling shade of pooling blue. “I just wanted to say that, um. That I’m really happy you got up and read. I, uh, I loved listening to that?” He was, Obi-Wan was shocked to realize, _shy,_ fidgeting his fingers in the hem of his shirt. 

“I feel like I should be saying that to you,” Obi-Wan said, before he could think better of it. “I felt like I couldn’t breath when you started reading.”

Skywalker grinned. “Me? No, that was— well, I’ve been called inelegant before, you know? I do a lot of screaming. You’re just, you’re all class, just—” He cleared his throat, and thrust out a hand. “My name is Anakin,” he said, “Anakin Skywalker.”

“I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Obi-Wan took the hand, shook it. Felt the thin fingers tuck into his. “Do you always read like that?”

“Like what?”

“So — engaged. You were living the emotions again, in front of all of us.”

Anakin’s face lit up. “I take a lot of inspiration from performance poets. I want to bring life into the page, you know? But your restraint, it works so well with the way you write, and your language, I really thought—”

“That allusion to Coldridge later in your piece, spoken with that much pointed emotion, it elevated—”

The both stopped, stared at each other, suddenly wearing identical excited smiles. Obi-Wan felt as if his ears were ringing. 

Anakin gestured to a table in the back. “Do you wanna, you know,” he waved. “Sit down.”

“Y-Yes,” Obi-Wan said. He felt suddenly very far away from his fingers. “Yes, let’s do that.”

They sat. And they talked. 

The conversation spun like yarn, and as naturally as a wheel down a hill. Influences, first exposures— to Coleridge, to Blake, to Hughes, to Angalo, to teachers who cared— trends they thought were brilliant and trends they didn’t understand. Anakin disliked 20th century post-war writers, but had a soft spot for Petrarchan sonnets **.** Anakin pulled out the spiral notebook again, flipped it around, showed meticulous handwriting in soft pencil, and Obi-Wan laughed and pulled out his own, hardback and covered in untidy pen scrawl. And it was— 

Well. It was magic. It was turning the page of a book and discovering something beautiful on the other side.

They were deep into a debate on whether _The Tradition_ or _The New Testament_ was a better entry point to Jericho Brown’s work, when Obi-Wan felt a light hand touch his shoulder. He turned, suddenly realizing how dry his mouth was. 

Quin looked down at him, eyebrows raised. “Hey, Obi,” he said, “you all good over here?”

“Oh.” Obi-Wan cleared his throat. “Yes, very well. I was just getting to know Anakin here.”

Anakin waved, going for smooth and confident but landing on painfully awkward, and Obi-Wan had never been more endeared to a near-stranger in his entire life. 

“It’s a relief to see you being social, my friend,” Quinlan grinned. “But I’m about to head out, I’ve got a thing with Aalya early tomorrow.”

Quin stared at him expectantly, and it took a beat for Obi-Wan to remember that he’d been his ride here tonight. 

“Ah. Right, of course, I’m sorry if I kept you, Quin.” He glanced over at Anakin, feeling a sudden, stabbing pain at the idea of leaving. He opened his mouth, about to suggest that he take a cab or an Uber home, but Anakin cut him off before he could. 

“I could take you home,” he said, “if you want to stay here for a little bit longer. I drove here.”

Obi-Wan responded far too quickly. “Yes. Yes, I think that sounds wonderful.”

Quinlan looked between them, eyebrows raised, something like wonder at the edges of his expression. “Sure thing,” he said slowly, “if you’re cool with that, Obi-Wan. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” 

Obi-Wan got to his feet and Quin pulled him into a quick hug, pausing just long enough to give him a significant look and a shoulder squeeze before he headed to the door. Obi-Wan watched him go, and then sat back down. He and Anakin looked at each other for a long moment. The bar around them was suddenly very loud. 

“Would you,” Anakin paused and swallowed. “Do you wanna get out of here?”

“Yes.” The words tripped off of Obi-Wan’s tongue, probably too fast, but Anakin didn’t seem like he was going to judge him for it. “We can go back to my house, if you want to.” Then the implications of that hit him, and he felt his ears heat up. “I mean. Only if you’re comfortable. I don’t want to—”

“No!” Anakin leaned over the table, and paused. His hand was stretched out, as if he were about to take Obi-Wan’s hand, but stopped himself at the last second.

On impulse, Obi-Wan turned his hand over and closed the last few inches of space, twining their fingers together. Anakin stared at them for a long second. 

“That sounds great,” he said hoarsely. “Back to yours sounds great.”

They got to their feet, fingers still entwined. 

.

Obi-Wan maybe hadn’t thought this through. 

“I’m so sorry about the mess,” he fussed, moving half-unpacked cardboard boxes over to the side to clear a better path to the coat hooks. “I’m not quite settled in here yet, I’m afraid.”

“Just moved?” Anakin asked, looking around the space with interest. The scattered boxes, the faded walls, the lack of pictures on the wall. The foundation-deep sense of unlived-in cold that seemed to emanate from the corners. 

“Just moved back, would be a better assessment. After years away. This was—” Obi-Wan forced his breath not to hitch. “This was my father’s house. I lived here as a teenager.”

Anakin didn’t comment any further. Instead, he asked, “Can I see more of your work?”

Feeling more steady with that course of conversation, Obi-Wan smiled. “Only if I can see yours, too.”

Obi-Wan led them into the kitchen, moved some of the papers and mugs off the table. 

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“Water would be great.”

“And to eat? I can offer you—” Obi-Wan looked at his distressingly bare fridge. The only thing that stood out, other than milk and eggs and some questionable takeout, was a bowl of brightly-colored red. “...I can offer you cherries,” he said.

“Cherries?” A laugh threatened the edge of Anakin’s voice, so Obi-Wan turned around with the most exaggeratedly serious expression he could muster. He held the bowl in front of him like an offering. 

“Cherries,” he repeated, and Anakin laughed.

“I like cherries,” he said, and so Obi-Wan brought the bowl and two glasses to the table. 

The fruits shone like gems in the yellow light of the kitchen lamp. The red of them almost had weight. Anakin reached out, picked one up, rolled it between his fingers. Bit into it, and smiled around the juice and the pit. 

Obi-Wan sat down across from him, totally not because he felt his legs going weak. He took a cherry for himself. 

“What was,” Obi-Wan asked, the question rising to his lips as natural as breath, “the first poem that ever really spoke to you?”

Anakin chewed the cherry, swallowed, picked up another. His lips twitched. “I don’t know if I want to tell you that.”

“Why?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Oh, trust me,” Anakin said, “it is.”

Obi-Wan laid his chin on his hand. He was holding a cherry by its stem between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it so the plump fruit spun. “Tell me anyway. I’m not going to laugh. Or judge you. Pinky swear.” 

On a whim, he actually held out his pinky. And, seemingly on the same whim, Anakin reached out and hooked their fingers together. He spoke like that, with their arms a bridge across the table and over the bowl of cherries. 

“Well,” Anakin said slowly, “it wasn’t really a poem.”

“What was it?”

Anakin hesitated another moment, and then took on a strange, half-sing-song intonation. _“You are so fragile and thin/Standing trial for your sins/Holding onto yourself the best you can./You are the smell before rain/You are the blood in my veins—_ ”

A slow smile crept onto Obi-Wan’s face. _“Call me a safe bet/I'm betting I'm not?”_ he finished, taking on the melody slightly stronger than Anakin had. 

Anakin blinked as if he’d been flicked in the nose. And then his mouth fell open. “Are you telling me—”

“What, you thought you were the only person who thought Jesse Lacey was the greatest wordsmith of our generation, at one point?” Obi-Wan said, his voice warm and low and filled with an easy humor. “I know Quin says I come across as too stuck up, but I promise I didn’t grow up in some Victorian nursery.”

“I won’t make that mistake again, then,” Anakin said. He seemed to suddenly remember that their pinkies were still linked, and he glanced down at them. Then he looked up at Obi-Wan’s face, their eyes meeting. The air turned heavy and electric. 

“Of course,” Obi-Wan said, “I did always prefer Taking Back Sunday—”

Anakin’s face flashed genuine outrage for a moment, before Obi-Wan broke and started laughing. Anakin lunged over the table, grabbed a cherry, and pelted it at Obi-Wan’s head.

.

“I could get us wine, if you’d like,” Obi-Wan said. Papers were spread around them— sheets printed out from Obi-Wan’s laptop, pulled pages from Anakin’s spiral notebook, plain pieces of scrap paper now covered in scratched-out handwriting and little doodles. “Or beer, I think I have some of that. Whiskey?”

“No,” said Anakin, eyes intense on the pages, and then intense on Obi-Wan. “No, I’m sure I want to be sober for this.”

.

They’d migrated the chairs so that they were next to each other. The bowl of cherries was half empty. 

“You’re a professor,” Anakin stated.   
  


“I’m half a professor,” Obi-Wan corrected, waving vaguely. “I’m an adjunct. The rest of the time I spend at the Arts Council, doing outreach and helping with all the rest of the coordination. And writing. And now,” he waved his hand vaguely around the dim room, “trying to make this place more livable, I suppose. What do you do? I— I don’t think you’ve mentioned that yet, actually.”

Anakin shrugged. “I do freelance writing. Sometimes poetry for journals, sometimes essays for online pubs, a few actual like, long-form type journalism pieces. Then I bartend, usually. And get hired to do for after-school workshops, sometimes. Right now I’m living with a friend and helping with rent, until I figure out something more permanent.”

“A jack-of-all-trades, then.”

Anakin snorted. “If you wanna call it that.”

Obi-Wan smiled. “I do.”

There was a pause. “What was the first poem that really spoke to _you?”_ He echoed the question from earlier.

Obi-Wan thought, for a long second. Then he said, _“Oh, the Places You’ll Go.”_

Anakin’s head tilted. The motion shifted his hair into his eyes. “Dr. Seuss?”

_“All alone!”_ Obi-Wan quotes, _“whether you like it or not, alone is something you’ll be quite a lot.”_

Another easy pause, free of weight or judgement or embarrassment. Then Anakin nodded, satisfied with the answer. 

.

Obi-Wan made tea while Anakin leaned his cheek on his hand, doodling intricate spirals on the paper in front of him. It was an older poem of Obi-Wan’s, something about an abandoned woodshed, the ivy taking it over. 

"Why do you always do this?" Anakin asked, circling one of the lines with his pen. “Is it on purpose, or subconscious?”

Obi-Wan placed both mugs down on the table and leaned over Anakin’s shoulder to look. "Do what?"

"In your writing.” The pen danced across the page, trailing out a map that didn’t need to go anywhere. “You always— talk around the feeling. You take it out of you and put it into something else."

“Ah.” That was not the first time Obi-Wan heard that. "I suppose," he said, "I want to turn the emotion into something...something more concrete. I want to be able to hold it in my hand."

Anakin hmms, considering. He tapped the pen against his mouth. “That’s interesting. Not how I go about it.”

“How do you go about it?”

"Mostly, I just want the emotions out of me."

Obi-Wan’s hand found Anakin’s shoulder and rested there. His hands were warm from the tea mugs. Anakin did not pull away.

.

The cherry bowl was empty. Next to it was a mug filled with pits. 

“How long ago did he die?”

Obi-Wan’s breath hitched, but Anakin looked at him steadily. “Your father,” he said, “this was his house, right? I’m sorry, I just assumed—”

“Adoptive father.”

“What?”

“He was my adoptive father. He adopted me when I was 14. Pulled me out of the system. I never called him ‘Dad,’ though, or anything like it. He was always just Qui-Gon.” Obi-Wan’s lips twitched. It was not quite a smile. “He died about a year ago, now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be.”

The light in the kitchen hummed. 

“My mom,” Anakin said, “also died about a year ago. It wasn’t sudden, but it was— she was the only thing in my life which was always there, you know? The one person. Sometimes it felt like she was the only good thing, too. And then she — wasn’t there, anymore. Just gone. Forever.”

Obi-Wan’s throat felt tight. “Yes,” he said. “I understand that feeling.”

“Do you ever want to — run away from it, I guess? That feeling of empty?”

“I tried,” Obi-Wan said, and he could almost hear Qui-Gon laughing in the next room. “But I ended up back here, in this house, instead.”

Anakin hummed. Time dripped past them like melting ice. 

.

It was so late that it was early. Somehow, though Obi-Was couldn’t remember the details of it, they’d started holding hands again.

“Tell me,” Anakin said, eyes starting to droop, squeezing the hand in his tightly. There was a rough quality to his voice. “Tell me that you feel this, too. This thing between us, this—” 

“Connection,” Obi-Wan finished. “Yes. Yes, from the second I saw you start to read. I don’t think I’ve talked this much with someone in — well, months at least, not since —”

“You dad died,” Anakin picked up. “Me too, but with my mom. I saw you tonight and had to talk to you. I’m so glad you also wanted to talk to me.”

“How could I not?” It seemed inconceivable now, not to have struck up a conversation with this man. “I’d love to — to keep seeing you, if you would be open to that. Maybe we can get lunch, this Saturday?”

A strange expression passed over Anakin’s face, almost mourning, regret laid over surprise. “I can’t,” he said. Seeing Obi-Wan’s face, he quickly continued, “I want to, _fuck_ , I really want to, but I can’t. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Leaving for what?”

“I got a grant,” Anakin said, voice picking up excitement, his hand waving in the air. “I’ve been trying to get it for a long time. It’s for this project— a year-long educational tour. All over the country. I’m going to hit as many schools as will take me, all levels, and try to — make poetry accessible. Show them it’s a platform for everyone. And I leave tomorrow afternoon. This has been my dream for — I don’t even know how long.”

“Oh,” said Obi-Wan quietly. “Anakin, that’s incredible.”

“I’m so excited about it. A whole year, on the move, doing that.” The light in his eyes was conflicting. “But I want to go out to lunch with you, like, a lot, I’m sorry I can’t, this is just the worst timing in the world—”

Obi-Wan reached out and poked his face with an index finger. “I don’t believe in bad timing,” he said. “I’m glad we got tonight at all.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin. His eyes were heavily lidded. 

“Are you,” Obi-Wan hesitated. “Are you tired?”

Anakin blinked slowly. “Yes.”

“Would you like to go to bed?”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Just to—”

“Just to sleep, yes.” Obi-Wan smiled. It was a fragile little thing. “I’m also tired.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin. “Yeah, okay.”

.

Obi-Wan remembered the first time he slept in a bed that he got to call his, on a permanent basis. It was not in this house; it was in the apartment he and Qui-Gon lived in the first year after he’d been adopted. He’d piled himself in too many blankets. It took two weeks, but then he slept there more soundly than he ever had in the rest of his life. 

In a similar vein, there was a certain type of bed sharing, where the two people don't quite touch, but wrap around each other regardless. An exposure, not of skin, but of spirit. An exercise in vulnerability. Not, ‘I invite you to touch me,’ but ‘I trust you not to.’

Two people might melt together. They might hold hands over the pillow. They might sleep deep and dreamless. 

They did. 

.

They wake up the next morning. Anakin had a change of clothes and a toothbrush in his car. Obi-Wan made them eggs for breakfast. 

“When do you have to leave?”

“Soon, probably,” said Anakin. 

They ate in silence. All the words they spoke the night before swirled around them. 

“I’m very glad I met you,” Obi-Wan said, “but, if it’s not too forward to say, I am not looking forward to missing you.”

Anakin took his hand over the table again. “What if,” he said, “we did an experiment instead.”

“Oh?”

“For the year I’m gone,” Anakin began, “we pretend that we're Keats and Fanny Brawne. Or Ginsberg and Orlovsky. Or Dunne and Didion. And we write each other letters. And we keep in touch like that for a year, and then—”

Obi-Wan tilted his head, heart in his throat. “And then what?”

“Maybe, by the time I get back, we’ll be in love.” There was something in his tone of voice— teasing to hide an open, gaping vulnerability. 

Obi-Wan felt the same way. 

"Yes."

An hour later, Anakin left the house, got in his car, and drove away. Obi-Wan watched from the doorway. Both of them had a new contact programmed into their phones, addresses written down, and a new social media follow. 

Obi-Wan rested his cheek against the cool of the window. 

**September (the rest of it)**


	2. October

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> October: Learning how to speak
> 
> _“It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”  
>  ― Maggie Nelson, Bluets_

[Letter— several attempts]

~~Dear Anakin,~~

~~I am not sure how~~

~~Hello Anakin,~~

~~I am~~

~~Anakin,~~

~~It has been two weeks since~~

~~Dearest Anakin~~

~~Mr Skywalker,~~

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

It feels odd to be writing a hotel. I have written a fair number of letters, but I don’t think the destination I’ve sent it to has even been this temporary. It reminds me of old novels — about Paris in the 20s, expatriates and the Lost Generation. (I put Stein on my Comp 100 syllabus, can you tell?)

I expect that’s what you wanted. 

I am not sure what else to say. I have been enjoying watching your adventure unfold on social media, though. You seem to have much more going on in your life than I do. In lieu of anything interesting, have a list of observations I have made in the past week or so.

  * My undergrads all either hate writing or hate having to write for a Comp 100 class. Honestly, I cannot blame them for the second point. 
  * I started rereading Ginsburg, because our conversation put him back in my mind. I still think he’s one of the only Beats worth reading twice. 
  * The furnace in the basement is broken and I am going to need to replace the whole thing. 
  * This is the only easy thing I have written in months. 
  * I want to replace the curtains in the kitchen, but I cannot seem to make myself look at other patterns. 



I’m sorry I don’t have more interesting things to say. 

I hope you’re well, Anakin.

My best, 

Obi-Wan Kenobi

  
  


[Letter— several attempts]

~~Dear Obi-Wan,~~

~~I mis~~

~~Dearest ?? Obi-Wan,~~

~~what’s~~

~~OBI-WAN!  
  
How’ve you ~~

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan,

If I went back to Paris in the 20s, I would probably try to fist fight Hemingway. I’d probably lose, but I think I would try it. Maybe I could hit him with a chair and never need to read A Farewell to Arms. That’d be sweet. 

And ugh, why Stein? Like, I KNOW why Stein, but please tell me it’s her essays. Don’t give Tender Buttons to freshman, Kenobi. We want them to like reading. 

I am getting into the swing of things with the kids in these schools— I got a bunch of easy ones to start. Enthusiastic kids, just needed to hook them. A few too shy or too _cool_ to participate, but that’s gunna happen everywhere. We got something close to an actual baby open mike night in the second!! So far, so good. 

Had a teacher ask me for a poetry reading list for her class, too, and my brain broke while I tried to think of 7th-grade appropriate poetry. I almost panicked and said Maggie Nelson. Can you imagine giving a 7th grader Bluets? That would be fucking tragic. 

Anyway.

I feel like I’m having an adventure, just like you said. I am trying to figure out what the end goal is supposed to be though. Adventures always end up places, right? The knight fights the dragon and gets the grail. The kingdom is saved. All the important lessons are learned. You brought up the Beats — I don’t want this year to be my On The Road, and not just because Kerouac was a questionable person. 

Fuck, I want to be anything but aimless. 

All the things you’ve said are interesting, promise!! Don’t worry, I bet your kids will like the class more by the end of it. As for the furnace, well, at least you know now and not in December?

Regarding the writer’s block: me too. 

Thanks for writing me. 

ttyl, 

Anakin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're all enjoying! Please let me know if there are any accessibility problems with the edits!! 
> 
> Have a wonderful day :)))


	3. November

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> November: Learning to Listen
> 
> _"[...]lies building their tendrils into dim figures  
>  who disappear down corridors in west-side apartments  
> into childhood’s proof of being wanted, not  
> abandoned, kidnapped  
> betrayal staving off loneliness, I see the fog lunge in  
> and hide it_
> 
> _where are you?"_  
>  —Frank O'Hara, How to Get There 

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan, 

I am writing this because I can’t sleep and the idea of trying to do anything else right now makes me want to put my head through a plate glass window. That’s actually happened to me once, you know. I ended up with my head through a plate glass window. Or. Someone put my head through it, I guess. 

This isn’t a good thing to write about, probably. Letters are supposed to be about happy things. Getting your letters makes me happy, for sure. I don’t want mine to make you sad, just because I can’t write about anything happy tonight.

Do you ever feel like you’re too much? Not even just for other people, for yourself, too. You’re going so fast and feeling so much that your body can’t keep up with the rest of you. People have been telling me I’m going to burn out since I was 16 or so. I’m going to hit a wall. I am going to use all the energy I need to get through 80-something years of life before I turn 30.

But I don’t feel like that. I feel like I am always late. Always a half-beat away from being synched with the metronome. Trying to beat something that always gets there just a few seconds before I do. 

I’m going to burn out. That’s all anyone tells me. I might as well burn so bright that it means something, if I’m going to do that. 

Do you think that deleting someone’s contact from your phone is part of the post-modern mourning ritual? Accepting that you’re never going to be able to hit ‘call’ again. They’re never going to pick up. 

Everything feels too much. I wish I could just sleep. 

Other than meeting the kids, talking to you has been the best part of the past two months. Thanks. 

Your friend, 

Anakin

[Letter]

Anakin, 

I usually feel the opposite, actually. I am a half-filled pitcher. I am more shadow and static than skin. No one ever cares if I leave, because they never really realize I was there to begin with. 

I longed for people to miss me, throughout my entire life. You fear you will burn out before you can do anything worthwhile— I fear that I will leave and no one will realize I am gone. That I was ever there in the first place. 

And I also haven’t deleted his contact. In fact, I go back and reread our messages as if, one day, they might suddenly mean something more. Missing him feels like an open wound, and I shouldn’t touch it, but all I want to do is press. And I can’t even press it in a constructive way. I can’t write. I can only _feel_ , so horribly inside myself that I can’t process it. 

There are objects of his I can’t throw out, too. Plenty of people hold onto jewelry or favorite knick-knacks and call it memoriam. I don't think anyone would fault us for not deleting a contact. 

I’m sorry you cannot sleep. If you don’t mind me asking, what keeps you awake? For me, it’s rushing thoughts. Over-analyzation. The ‘what-ifs’ and the ‘still-to-dos’ haunting me like they’re at the foot of my bed. When I was still very young, in the early years of living with Qui-Gon, I used to get up and check that the door was locked three or four times a night. That had gotten better, until recently. 

You do have my phone number, you know. You could call me when you feel that way, and if I’m awake I’ll answer. 

Thank you for sharing that with me. I’ll talk to you soon.

My best,

Obi-Wan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so you all know, I would die for every single person who has commented on this fic. Unfortunately I have an anxiety block the size of a planet when it comes to answering comments, for reasons even I don't understand, but I wanted to let everyone know that you all made me like. Weep with joy. And I love all of you. 
> 
> I hope everyone is having a healthy, safe, and joyful holiday season. Take care of yourselves and each other, and let's get ready to leave this disaster year behind us, eh?


	4. December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> December: Learning the Past
> 
> _Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know  
>  what despair is; then  
> winter should have meaning for you._
> 
> _I did not expect to survive,  
>  earth suppressing me. I didn't expect  
> to waken again, to feel  
> in damp earth my body  
> able to respond again, remembering  
> after so long how to open again  
> in the cold light  
> of earliest spring--_
> 
> _afraid, yes, but among you again  
>  crying yes risk joy_
> 
> _in the raw wind of the new world._  
>  —Louise Glück, Snowdrops

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

Here’s a story, just like I promised you. 

Once, there was a little boy with red hair. It was much more red, at the time, than the person you’re picturing now. Hair darkens with age. Read whatever maudlin metaphor you’d like, into that. 

Anyway. There was a little boy with red hair, and nobody really wanted him around. His birth parents gave him up when he was too young to remember them but too old to be fashionably adoptable, and he was passed from temporary house to temporary house, from professional hand to professional hand, for most of his childhood. He slept in rooms and never got to put posters on the walls. He made friends, but then lost touch with them. He went someplace, and then the people there passed him on.

And then one day, when the boy was older, he was placed in a house in a place where people began building a lot of other houses, but ran out of money before it was done. So suddenly, he was surrounded by half-finished buildings, the skeletons of homes, four walls built and then abandoned. And the boy had a lot of free time, and not a lot of supervision. So he did what he always wanted to do as a much younger child; explore. 

Imagine this; a little boy, hair red, shoes tattered and held together with duct tape, army surplus store backpack. He’s sitting in the middle of an abandoned, unfinished house. Perhaps this room would have been the den. The dining room. A playroom for children. It’s quiet like abandoned places are; pulsing silence. Quiet that dances. The boy sits down in the center of the room, on the cool and dusty wood, his backpack next to him. And he closes his eyes. And he imagines. 

He fills the rooms with perfect families. Perfect love. Warmth and belonging. Voices calling to each other. He imagines siblings running from doorway to doorway, food cooking on the stove and the knowledge that it is his favorite. He imagines a place for him at the dinner table, for always. For forever. Behind his closed eyelids, he conjures a family, and he lets them go through their daily lives. Sometimes, he gets up and wanders through the house and follows the steps of their made-up routines. 

He does this because he knows he will never have it. He will never have it, but there was comfort in the pretending. 

And then, one day, a man shows up who seems too tall to be anything but a character in a storybook. And he takes the boy to a home which is not empty to begin with, but then they get to fill it together. The boy is able to make his own routines, real ones, with the man in that house. And it is not the perfect love he used to fill the empty houses with, but that only made it better. 

And if this was a story, that would be the end. Because people love to leave stories on happy endings.

But life continues after the happiness, and I think that’s the worst part. 

And, one day, the man died. 

And the little boy, who was not a little boy anyone, was alone again. 

And, Anakin, other than these letters and a few lines that cannot connect to anything, the only thing I have been able to write since he died is the following:

_ What do I do, now that I have lost the only person who ever chose me? _

It is written at the top of an otherwise-empty page of my notebook. And it haunts me, because I don’t know the answer. And I am once again living in a house where there’s only me. 

So there’s why I used to like urban exploration so much. Not as ‘bad boy’ as you were hoping, I’m sure. These days, I try to stick to hikes. 

Take care of yourself. 

My best, 

Obi-Wan

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan— 

Please warn me if your letters are going to make me cry. 

I kid, I kid. About the warning, not about the crying. 

I can’t tell you a story about me because nothing in my life has ever felt that liner. But I feel like I need to try. So, here; no story. Have some moments. 

Moment one: My mother. Always comes back to my mother, with me. It needs to. I can’t imagine a version of me who was not built, from sole of foot to the soul under my skin, entirely by my mother. My first memory is being cold and her holding me. I was cold because the windows in that shitty apartment didn’t close all the way. The only place I was warm was where my body touched hers. I think I was 4. 

Moment 2: My mom was hurt a lot. Just in general. It wasn’t even that people hurt her even though sometimes people hurt her. She just worked so hard and was so tired from it that she just. Got hurt. Bruises. 

Moment 3: She would always be so upset when I came home with the same. 

Moment 4: She got remarried when I was 11 and words cannot fucking describe how much I hate my stepfather. 

And I can go on but it doesn’t matter. There wasn’t a natural progression. It was just those feelings, circling each other, over and over again. Cycles and whirlpools. Always back to the same place. Back to the beginning. Until she died.

You talked about imaging perfect love. I always had that perfect love, but we were never safe enough to enjoy it. And right when we started to be, she died. 

I wanted to pull us from that, you know? I wanted to be good enough to stop us going back to the beginning. I wanted to drop out of school, get a job, help her like that, but she’d always tell me— ‘Ani, Ani, you have a gift. You can’t walk away from your gift, not even for me.’ Cause she always called my writing my gift. And she always believed in it. 

I have the opposite problem. Since she died, all I can do is write. All I can do is move and write about it. I can write about anything but her.  _ Everything _ but her.

Maybe something is chasing me. Maybe it’s going to catch up. 

Maybe I’ll just move motels again. 

We should go on a hike together, someday. 

Talk soon, 

Anakin

[Letter and Package] 

Dear Anakin:

Here are some happy endings. 

Enjoy. If you don’t want to carry the books with you, donate them to one of the school classrooms that you visit. Maybe they’ll help one of those children the way they helped me. 

Your friend, 

Obi-Wan

  


Books Included:

  * The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster
  * A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
  * The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin
  * A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
  * The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula K. Le Guin
  * Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, by Dr. Seuss



[Letter, and a package] 

Obi-Wan, 

Can’t take you out of the house, but here’s the next best thing. 

Enjoy— I take these wherever I go. I like that they don’t exist anywhere digitally. They’re like little pieces of my adventures, and they’re only for me. And, now, for you I guess.

Talk to you soon, 

Anakin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, this chapter is one of my favorite things that I've ever written. 
> 
> Also, every book on the list that Obi-Wan sends Anakin is a reason why I am here today. 
> 
> Also x2, Kit Fisto fronts an experimental jazz band. 
> 
> Hope you all enjoyed :)


	5. January

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> January: Learning Fears
> 
>  _Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--  
>  why are they no help to me now  
> I want to make  
> something imagined, not recalled?  
> I hear the noise of my own voice:_  
> The painter’s vision is not a lens,  
> it trembles to caress the light.  
>  _But sometimes everything I write  
>  with the threadbare art of my eye  
> seems a snapshot,  
> lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,  
> heightened from life,  
> yet paralyzed by fact._  
> -Robert Lowell, Epilogue

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan,

I am about to leave for a new state (I will text you my new address, you will probably have it by the time this letter gets to you, yay for snail mail). But I felt like I should send you something, so— 

I am terrible at New Years Resolutions, but here are mine:

  1. Stop throwing away drafts
  2. Read reviews of myself less often (twitter is mean)
  3. Get into less fights with people I can’t win against
  4. Get into more arguments with people whose mind’s I can change



I’m afraid to make a commitment to anything else. (Is wanting to see you in person again a resolution? hahaha)

Talk to you soon!

Anakin

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

I have a friend who talks so often about the silliness of resolutions that I have given up on making them. I suppose my goal for each year is to take what I learned the year before and apply it. 

...I am not sure if I succeeded at that last year. More hope for this one, then? 

Because I cannot give you resolutions for this next year, have a little bit of how I spent the end of the last one. Please enjoy this collection of lines and moments from my COMP 101 students’ final papers last semester:

  * “The Sephora vs. MAC debate has been a long standing issue in the cosmetics fanbase for decades.”
  * “Buckle up, bitches. I put red bull in the coffee maker and I'm ready to drill this out in two hours because it's due in 3.” (This was the first sentence. I suspect it was meant to be deleted before being turned in.) 
  * A paper titled “Stupid Final Paper Thing.” Not the same person as above. 
  * “The education of future horticulturists is vital to the environment and will determine if the Apocalypse actually occurs next year as detailed by the Ancient Macedonians.”
  * “Elizabeth Bennet is one of the worst written heroines in literary history.”
  * "According to [add source later] the encoding/decoding theory of [whatshisname] states that our consumption of media has changed rapidly in the last [idk] years."
  * One passionate paper advocating for embracing the use of carrier pigeons in a modern context. (This actually wasn't a bad essay, I just wasn't expecting it)



As I revise the syllabus for the semester which is about to start, I think I will give them more of a concrete prompt for this last project. 

All my best, 

Obi-Wan 

P.S: If meeting up in person is a resolution, then I have that for this year, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to get this out earlier, but my brain turned to soup for like 5 days. ;-;
> 
> A shorter chapter! but next time there will be More(it might even be A Lot, hehehehe), don't worry. Also, fun fact, the name of this chapter in my notes is "Anakin is Very Sad :((( "
> 
> Have a great day!


	6. February

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> February: Learning Where it Hurts
> 
>  _Expect death. In every line,  
>  Death is a metaphor that stands  
> For nothing, represents itself,  
> No goods for sale. It enters  
> Whether or not your house  
> Is dirty. [...]_  
> -Jericho Brown, Another Elegy (pg. 8, _The New Testament_ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter deals fairly intensely with feelings of grief over the loss of parental figures. The second half deals with it extensively. There is talk of both death via illness and death via a drunk driver. This chapter is also one of the only things I've ever worked on that has made me cry while writing it, so take that as you will. 
> 
> This is as heavy as it gets, my friends, I promise.

[Letter: Postcard. Homemade.]

[Text on back]

Dear Obi-Wan,

As long as you PROMISE!!

From, 

Anakin

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

  * 6 teaspoons flour
  * 4 teaspoons sugar
  * 1⁄4 teaspoon baking powder
  * 1 teaspoon cocoa
  * 3⁄4 teaspoon shortening
  * 1 pinch salt
  * 6 teaspoons milk



Preheat Easy Bake Oven 15 minutes

Mix together flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, cocoa and shortening. Stir in milk until smooth. Pour into a greased pan. Bake in Easy Bake oven for 12 to 15 minutes.

(Which is to say; yes, Anakin, I promise)

Yours, 

Obi-Wan

[Draft, Poem]

**Cleaning out his Office**

I am filling boxes and thinking about  
how you never threw anything away.   
  


Your giant old writing desk,   
mended and mended again,

  
every half-broken trinket you took the time to fix,   
or kept because the break made it special.

  
Your great, warm hands, closing   
my small, cold hands over a crooked little bell,  
  


telling me how its chime was so much sweeter for the dent.  
Always looking in my eyes, when you said things like that.  
  


That office only exists to be packed up into boxes, now,   
by the shaking hands of your twice-orphaned son.   
  


What are broken things supposed to do,  
when the person who loved them is no longer there?

[Draft, Poem]

**Lessons**

My mother taught me how to squeeze a fist  
and then spent the rest of her life   
making damn sure  
my stepfather never taught me how to use them.  
  


She was a hard woman,  
because the world made her hard.  
  


My mother poured herself like asphalt  
over jagged, broken gravel. She made it smooth.  
She took impossible paths and made them passable.   
She did this by flattening herself.  
  


The road of my life   
has been paved by her sacrifices   
  


And how dare the universe condemn me to that—   
to take the form of every other man in her life  
and step onto my mother.  
  


This is how I learned how to hate.  
  


But when I clenched my hands into fists,   
she would tangle our fingers together:  
  


 _What wonderful revenge it would be,  
_ _to be soft in a world that doesn't want you soft_. 

I told my mother I’d bring her to a place   
where she did not need to be road or foundation  
or idol or object. A place she could melt in softness.  
  


I wonder if she knew.  
  


When she died, I screamed for a week.   
  


To my shame, my only thought  
was cursing that she taught me  
not to use my fists.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold, the watershed moment. I am probably too proud of this chapter, though I'm still not totally happy with Anakin's poem. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Talk to you all soon! <3


	7. March

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> March: Learning to Stand
> 
> _[...]A night broken down into grains_
> 
> _If you find yourself lost, dig_
> 
> _a cave in the snow, quickly  
>  you need shelter against the night_
> 
> _A candle could keep you alive  
>  the engine of your lungs_
> 
> _will heat the air around you, someone will  
>  miss you, they will send out dogs_
> 
>  _You must be somewhere, right?_  
>  —Nick Flynn, Elsewhere, Mon Amour

[Letter]

Dear Anakin,

What a strange, liminal month March is — I wonder, is that something which makes you like it? Is March the airport of the year, for you, so to speak? The feeling of change anchored to a time and a place; still not something that I see the appeal of, but I think about you every time I think about it, now. In-between places, in-between times. 

There was sleet and freezing rain, last week. I discovered that the gutters in the front of the house also need to be replaced. I don’t know what Qui-Gon was doing, the last few years he lived here, but maintaining the house was evidently not a priority. Or maybe the few months this place sat with no one living in it was the straw that broke the camel's back. 

I have acquired several old issues of Home and Garden magazines, from the donation bin at the arts council (don’t worry, they were old enough that they were about to be used for Depa’s decoupage projects with our 12-14 year olds). I think that’ll be the project, now. I think you were right. I’d like to take this place back from the entropy which seems to have claimed it. 

When I was going through the magazines (and don’t ask me what I’m looking for in them, I have no idea. Inspiration? Instructions? How To Homeowner 101, with easy-to-follow pictures?), I found myself somewhat entranced by the vernacular of how they’re written. I never noticed the kinds of words which get used in home improvement magazines, and nowhere else. I got distracted from finding inspiration for the house, and ended up circling words and phrases which caught my eye instead. 

I don’t particularly like blackout or found poetry, but the result is the following;

hues that soothe and lift our spirits  
like in this neutral living  
room—   
you can personalize  
even an envelope.  
given the DIY a modern upgrade  
to break up the room  
and your day.

I’m thinking about using something like that in a program for CCOTA. And there’s something there, beauty in the word banks of people who only speak to each other — it has me thinking. Have you noticed how easy it is to pick up the speech patterns of the people you speak to a lot? I have Mace saying “bloody” now. He hates it.

This is something of an unfocused letter. I hope that’s okay. I hope you are well. 

I’ll talk to you soon. 

Yours, 

Obi-Wan

P.S: Enclosed is a strange tea I found which is supposed to taste like coffee. I tried it, and I hate it. Maybe you would like it more?

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan,

Unfocused letters are probably one of my favorite kinds of letters. Just throw stream of consciousness at me, I can handle it. I’ve seen worse from the kids, probably.

(Don’t get me wrong, all the kids I work with are great, and everything I do is way more process over product. It doesn’t matter if it’s “good,” what matters is that they’re writing and understanding themselves better, and finding out that poetry is something they can and should try out and interact with. That being said, sometimes you end up with results which just make no sense, to a hilarious degree. One of them wrote a poem about two fish sword fighting with swordfish. It was wonderful. I also get so many gloriously cliché teenage love poems. Honestly, I miss being that confident in everything I did, sometimes. Being that confident in every emotion I felt. The fact that every single one of them writes something like “I will force myself to continue on, always knowing you were my One True Love” is just incredible. The most universal human experience is writing terrible love poetry as a teenager which you will be embarrassed about two years later. I love it.)

Anyway. 

I’ll disagree on one of your points, because I love blackout poetry. And found poetry. Anything that breaks and challenges what poetry is supposed to be is totally incredible if you ask me. Even if the product doesn’t turn out great. So cool. I am about it. 

Sometimes you gotta break something to understand it better, you know?

I’ve never read many home improvement magazines. Never read that many magazines in general, except for skateboarding ones. The skateboarding ones used to be so cool— my mom used to take them from me from her job. I’d cut out the pages and stick them on my walls and binders. 

I don’t know if March is the airport of the year. It doesn’t feel magic to me, but maybe I just haven’t found the magic yet. But every time I see old houses now, I think of you. 

Bouncing off that idea of vernacular, though, here's a thought: people speak different languages within the languages they already speak. Do lawyers say ‘I love you’ to each other the same way carpenters say ‘I love you’ to each other? Would one talking to the other be able to understand what they were saying? 

Miscommunication is background + carelessness. Not taking the time to understand who you’re talking to. 

Wow, now I am hitting you with stream of consciousness. I shouldn’t write letters tired. 

I actually feel like I’ll sleep tonight, though. 

Until next time.

Your friend, 

Anakin

[Letter/Package]

Obi-Wan:

Now  _ I  _ found weird tea. Tell me if you like this?

Anakin

[Letter/Package]

Anakin— 

Enjoy a little light reading, for once. 

All my best, 

Obi-Wan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have tried that weird coffee-tasting lie tea. It was too weird to function. 
> 
> This chapter was much lighter, and it was shorter. I hope you enjoyed regardless!!


	8. April

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> April: Learning to Walk
> 
> _"To what purpose, April, do you return again?  
>  Beauty is not enough.  
> You can no longer quiet me with the redness  
> Of little leaves opening stickily.  
> I know what I know."  
> [...]  
> —Edna St. Vincent Millay, April_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prepare for some _epic_ Fake Deep on Main, my friends.

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan, 

I’m thinking about forgetting, tonight. I am thinking about forgetting, and how that’s its own kind of trauma. 

What I mean is that sometimes you wake up and you can’t remember something, and that’s an even worse shock than being able to remember it. It feels like hitting the ground, instead of like falling. 

Because memory is more construction than anything, isn’t it? What if the way I remember it happening isn’t how it happened? What if the bad parts were better, or the good parts were worse?

What if the good parts weren’t actually good at all?

What if I wake up one day and all the good parts are gone? 

Memories change, memories fade. I don’t want to forget— well, I don’t want to forget anything. So I take pictures and I write things down.

It doesn’t help, for a lot of things. 

I know that I am going to wake up one day and not quite remember how her voice sounded. What it smelled like, when it was just her and I in the kitchen. Or how the carpet in the hallway felt when you fell on it, or the colors of the title in the basement. 

I don’t really want to remember those last two, even. I just don’t want to forget them. How can I be the same person I am now if I forget things, even a little bit?

Because. When someone leaves, all you have is the memories. That’s all. Nothing else. 

So now I’m sitting here, holding onto everything with two grasping hands, even the things that are hurting me, even though I know it’s not going to matter. I am going to forget no matter what. 

~~What will happen if no one remembers m~~

Things just hurt you twice, I guess. The first time when they happen, and the second time when you start to forget. 

Unrelated, but I still think you should clash the paint and curtain colors as much as possible. I still think that would be funny.

Peace out.

Yours, 

Anakin

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

I think that experiences which shape you never really go away. You move further away from the details, but not away from the feelings those details brought you. Not the lessons that you learned from experiencing the things that made the memories. 

Memory is construction, but the way you have adjusted your behavior _based_ on those memories is not. You may not remember the fall which taught you to be afraid of a certain flight of stairs, but your heart still raced when you stood at the tops of them until you were 12 (you, in this case, is me, because I needed to pull an example). You may not remember the first time someone told you to shut up, but you might remember to listen to that command for years afterward.

You may not remember every moment and detail of your mother, but that does not mean that every moment didn’t happen. Didn’t matter. Didn’t make you who you are. 

We are not cassette tapes, or hard drives. Humans are not built to house perfect memories. We are built to change and grow and take the important things from the past and fold them into our DNA. Not recording devices, but sprawling gardens. The grass grows and the rocks shift. The leaves die and drop and are folded into the soil again, to be made into something that can be used by the new growth. It does not matter that there is not a perfect image of them; they existed. We have proof of it. We are more because they were there. 

We are so much more complex than a cassette tape because humans can take a memory from the past and make it more. Make it _mean_ more, or mean less. Give it power or stand up and take power away from it.

Which is to say, yes, people forget things. And forgetting is just as profound a trauma as you so beautifully expressed. But that doesn’t mean that clinging to parts of it until they break apart and you bleed is the way to keep those fading memories close. 

Then again, I have something of a strange relationship with permanence, myself. When I was a child, I was very aware that nothing ever stayed static and stable. Not my house, not the people I was living with, not the amount of my belongings I would be allowed to take with me to the next foster home. I became very good at letting things go. Perhaps too good at it. I’ve been called ‘foolishly forgiving’ before. 

I have read your writing about your mother. I think I would have loved to meet her, more than anything. I think that, from what I now know about her, that her memory is woven into the fabric of how you live. She is preserved in your writing, and in the way that you live your life. You cannot forget the way you were raised. She is in every moment of you. 

As for things hurting you twice; there’s a theory in cognitive psychology, about pain and memory. Because pain is our body’s reaction to external stimuli, some people say that the memory of pain can never be as acute as experiencing it was. It’s impossible to hold onto how much it hurt at the time, because your brain cannot hold onto sensations it is not currently feeling. This might be why, for instance, breaking a leg will hurt just as much the second time as it did the first time. There is no such thing as “increasing a pain tolerance.” It will always just hurt. What is left is the person inside the body, learning to live with the memory of what hurt them. 

Maybe we feel all pain the same way each time it finds up. And it changes us. And then our bodies don’t let us remember how much it hurt. There’s something here I am having a hard time grasping— something about the way things hurt us not changing how _much_ they hurt us. Sometime about how that might help us learn.

I think I may have stopped making sense. My apologies, my dear. I am writing too late at night. 

Also, I will not clash my curtains and walls, because I enjoy living in places which don’t hurt my eyes and sensibilities to look at. 

Be well. 

Yours, as always, 

Obi-Wan

[Poem, First Draft]

Introducing My Mother to ~~the Man I~~ ~~Lo~~

Introducing My Mother to ~~My~~ ~~Best~~

Introducing My Mother to ~~Someone~~

_FUCK_

I Bring Home a Man and Introduce Him to My Mother   
  


You smile when I come in  
holding his hand, and I suspect you knew  
because you always know,   
and [...]

[Poem, Second Draft; Unfinished]

  
We have to dip our cups  
into the water of the Catholics  
for this next bit of imagery.   
And you will have to forgive me,  
for sewing your holiness into theirs.  
But I do not know how else to describe you,  
other than something molded by a perfect God.

I look across an expanse and see  
a tower which that perfect God   
carved out of marble. I think he kisses  
his work, when he is finished.   
Would it be sacrilege, to do the same?  
Place myself in the place where he stood  
and press my lips to your cheek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit more actual writing, a bit less social media posts! I had too much fun writing Obi-Wan's poem here. 
> 
> Would you believe that picture I used for baby Anakin and Shmi is just a stock image that manages to be a dead ringer for Pernilla August? Cause I also couldn't believe it when I found it. 
> 
> Also, [here](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147475/the-inside-out-mermaid) is the Matthea Harvey poem "The Inside Out Mermaid," which I highly recommend :))


	9. May

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> May: Learning to Run
> 
> _[...] For me, love’s like the wind, unseen, unknown.  
>  I see the trees are bending where it’s been,  
> I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown.  
> I really don’t know what 'I love you' means.  
> I think it means 'Don’t leave me here alone.'_
> 
> —Neil Gaiman, Sonnet

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

I did a very silly thing, when I was repainting the living room. 

The walls were originally this strange yellow-white color. I have no idea if Qui-Gon picked that or if the house came with that color. If the house came with it, they’ve been that color for just about the same amount of time that I’ve been alive. I grew up with the walls looking like that. 

It was all faded, though. Nearly just pain white. I needed to cover it with primer before painting anyway, but it wouldn’t need a thick coat to do the job. 

I had a permanent marker on one of the cans of paint, to help label things. And I uncapped the marker to write something down, and I had the strangest feeling come over me. 

I didn’t write on the labels. I started writing on the walls. 

It was some poetry, I think. Or it was nearly poetry. The kind of brainstorming warm-up writing you do before you sit down to work, or something like journaling. Throwing the things that hurt you out on paper. The kind of writing you never show anyone, because you don’t have to. It wasn’t writing  _ for, _ it was writing  _ because _ .

But I don’t fully remember any of it. I didn’t record what I wrote there. I didn’t copy it down into a notebook, I didn’t take a picture of it. I don’t remember any of the writing being particularly good, but even if it was— it doesn’t matter. I don’t want it to matter. 

I want them to exist someplace and then be covered up forever. In my house, but always unseen. It doesn’t matter anymore. They are out of me. They are on the walls. 

And then I painted over them. 

I poured the primer into the roller tray and dipped my roller in it, and then I watched the words vanish under coat after coat of paint. I chose one of the colors you helped me narrow down to, that blue one, because the color makes my heartbeat slow down. I wanted to remember the yellow with its compliment, and make this place somewhere I could imagine away the anxiety and draft. 

You can’t see any trace that I wrote on them anymore. It’s all just smooth paint and drop clothes. It’s drying in the next room as I write this. 

I am here, now. That moment is wrapped into the foundation of the house. It feels like it’s mine. 

My whole house smells like pain and I destroyed a shirt while doing this. I have a headache from the fumes. 

The house doesn’t feel as cold anymore. 

Thank you. 

Yours, 

Obi-Wan

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan, 

I gave away one of your books to a girl named Ahsoka. I promise it was worth it. 

She was in my workshop this weekend. Meeting her was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself, years and years ago. Myself when I was angry and hurting and too young to really understand why I was angry and hurting, or have a healthy outlet for it. 

Her poetry was so raw. You know how it is, with kids — there’s  _ something _ there, I don’t know what, but it’s there and you can tell that it’s going to bloom into something fucking incredible if she gives herself time to develop. 

I don’t think she even considered that she’s worth giving herself the time. 

And. And. Something else weird, she’s a foster kid, too. Like you were. And she does kinda the same thing you do in her writing, where she puts so much into physical symbols, and the emotions go around and in and under the images and. 

And I didn’t want her to be sad. I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t worth anything.

So I gave her some of the books you gave me, I gave her  _ Oh, the Places You’ll Go _ because I remember you telling me how much it meant to you, and also the Le Guin books, cause I thought they were good. I gave her my email address and told her to email me if she wanted any feedback on more of her work. 

I was trying so hard to not be weird, I know this can come across so badly, but she’s got this fire and the world would be worse if it went out. Someone with that much talent shouldn’t doubt that they have talent. 

Even if she doesn’t email me (I hope she does, I want to help this kid so much), I wanted to give her. I don’t know. Some moment where an adult gave a fuck. A second in school where the person teaching her wasn’t against her. 

And I was probably projecting and making this about me when it shouldn't be, and that probably makes me a bad activist, but also she just. 

She looked really happy, when I gave her those things. She lit up like I handed her something way more than some books and a scrap of paper. 

I felt so. I don’t know. At peace, in that moment. Happy, but a really settled-in-you-body happy. 

Obi-Wan, I really think this is what I was meant to be doing. 

Yours, 

Anakin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter I am most unhappy with, tbh :/ something about it really doesn't work for me. But! We shall prevail, as we enter the homestretch of this story. 
> 
> Also, a giant thank you to Eli/loosingletters, who made that tumblr thread at the beginning possible after I went through some truly epic frustration when trying to put it together myself, wherein I almost took a bit out of my laptop because I was so annoyed. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed! Have a wonderful day <3


	10. June

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> June: Learning to Smile
> 
> _We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision._
> 
> —Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flirting

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan, 

I’ve been thinking about something you said to me, months ago. That line you wrote when you couldn’t write anything else. 

_ “What do I do, now that I have lost the only person who ever chose me?” _

I wrote it down on a post-it note and I've been keeping it in my wallet. And I look at it sometimes and think about it, because it's been itching my brain since the first time I read it. And I wasn’t sure why. I always overthink things that I don’t understand, what about you?

But today I unfolded the post-it note again— it started doing that really cool folded-paper thing, where it’s been folded and unfolded so many times that it moves like hinges on a box instead of paper— and I finally figured out why I kept going back to it and thinking about it. 

I wanted to share it with you. Because I want you to know that you’d still be, like.  _ Worth something, _ if no one ever chose you to begin with. Or if no one ever chose you again. I don’t want you to think that the only reason you’d have any purpose for being here is because you were ‘chosen’ in some way or another. Everything has worth without having to lean on other things to prop it up. 

Obi-Wan Kenobi on his own is just as valuable as Obi-Wan Kenobi who Qui-Gon adopted. 

That felt important to say, because it’s true. It also is going to seem like the next thing I say contradicts it. I promise it doesn’t, at least in my head. 

You don’t need to be afraid of no one choosing you, because I will. If you ever need someone to. I’ll choose you. 

Which is to say. You’re one of my “drop everything” people now. If I had a workshop and got a call from you, I’d step out to take the call. Cause I know you’d only be calling me if it was important. And if you called me drunk at a bar at 3am, I’d come pick you up and not even complain about it. And if someone was throwing a really cool party on the same day that we had plans to just, I don’t know. Watch a movie in your living room. I’d hang out in your living room.

And that doesn’t make you less valuable on your own! You don’t suddenly have more worth because you’re that person to me, or that person to  _ anyone _ . But. Don’t be afraid of no one choosing you. Qui-Gon isn’t the only one anymore. 

I really want to be there for you when you need me.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense. I’m not sure why it feels like I’m talking around something else here. But it felt important to say, and I hope I didn’t weird you out by saying it. 

Just. To summarize, remember these two things, I guess. 

  1. You don’t need to be chosen, to be worth something. 
  2. You don’t need to worry about no one choosing you, because I always will. 



Love, 

Anakin

[Letter]

Dear Anakin, 

I need to say thank you for two reasons: not only for what you wrote in your last latter, but for knowing me well enough to know it needed to be said. 

It’s hard, sometimes, for me to understand that worth is not based on usefulness. That I don’t need to justify the space I take up by giving that space something back. 

People sculpt their space, as much as it also works the other way around. I must remember that. 

It does help, though, that he chose me. 

I think both of those things can exist at the same time, like you said. 

And, Anakin, just so you know— I would choose you back, every time. 

I used to be very afraid of being lost in places with a lot of people. That got better, the older I got. I think, maybe, the scariest part of being lost is being afraid that there’s no one out there looking for you. 

Isn’t that the true horror of being alone? That you could be gone, and no one would know. 

What I’m trying to say it that. Well. You said you’d always choose me. I say to you, don’t worry, if you get lost. I will always come to find you. 

Thank you for everything. 

Yours, 

Obi-Wan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three more chapters!!!!! Three more chapters!!!!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed!!!


	11. July

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> July: Learning the Path
> 
> _Taking the hands of someone you love,  
>  You see they are delicate cages…  
> Tiny birds are singing  
> In the secluded prairies  
> And in the deep valleys of the hand._  
> —Robert Bly, Taking the Hands

[Letter]

Dear Anakin,

Thoughts on this? 

**In Response to the Greeks**

I watch people polish love into marble.   
They speak it with the same tongue  
that others use to speak of Old Gods.   
Old Myths. Old Sorrow. 

Carve themselves and their lover  
into the silhouettes of old tragedies. 

Please, my love—   
do not paint us into Epic. 

Do not chisel my face into stone,   
declare me the Achilles to your Patroclus. 

I refuse to be the Hephaestion  
to your Alexander. 

Cast neither of us is Icarus.   
This will not be a violent fall;

If high art is bleeding tragedy   
I do not want to be high art. 

Please, make us Gomez and Morticia.   
Make us Lucy and Ricky.  
Make us afternoon-snack arguments  
which are fixed with a kiss   
by the ending credits. 

I refuse the call to Epic.   
I will stand by your side instead. 

Give me the smallest and most delicate of loves  
and I will worship it on my knees. 

I will cradle it in both hands.

Let me know. 

Love, 

Obi-Wan

[Letter: a single enclosed polaroid]

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan, 

I am getting tired of all this moving around. 

I realized that last night. For about a half hour, it was horrifying. I thought everything people said was suddenly coming true— this is what burnout feels like. This is where the slipping away starts. 

And then, before I got myself too worked up in a panic, I had the realization that. Well. It’s not the work I’m tired of. And the magic hasn’t gone away. I still feel like I’m entering someplace exciting when I walk into an airport. I still feel so accomplished every time I watch a lesson click in a kid’s head. 

But. I’ve been moving around for months, just constantly. And I guess I’m just...fatigued? Is fatigued the word? I think it is. I’ve worked a muscle to the point where it’s sore, but not too sore. I want to stop and rest. 

And when I realized that, something else hit me. Because I’m not _afraid_ to stop and rest, anymore. I’ve been afraid for so long, that something would catch up if I stopped. My guilt. My mother. Time. The creative block I’m dreading. 

But. I’m not afraid of that, suddenly. Not at all. 

God. When did I stop running away, and just start _running?_

I’m looking forward to stopping, for a little bit. I’m daydreaming about rest. About sitting in your kitchen, again. 

It’s been so long since I imagined some place to go back to. I’m sorry if it’s overstepping boundaries, I’m sorry if I’m making it weird, but. That’s what I’ve been imagining. Your kitchen. That night. 

Even if I never end up back there, if I get home and you decide you never want to talk to me again, I just wanted to thank you, for giving me that. For giving me a place to imaging going back to. 

Miss you. 

Love, 

Anakin

[Postcard, homemade]

[Text on back]

Dear Anakin:

I cannot imagine not speaking to you again. 

You are always welcome here. 

Love, 

Obi-Wan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic should be completed by Sunday :))))
> 
> Also I like the dramatic gayness of the Classics as much as the next queer but _god_ do I want small, happy gay stories ,too. 
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed!


	12. August

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> August: Learning what Home Is
> 
>  _It feels right to be up this close in tight wind  
>  It feels right to notice all the shiny things about you  
> About you there is nothing I wouldn’t want to know  
> With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler  
> About you many good things come into relation [...]_  
> —Peter Gizzi, Lines Depicting Simple Happiness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man am I proud of this one and was so nervous to post it ahhhh.

[Letter]

Dear Obi-Wan:

This isn’t finished yet. How do you think it should end?

**Declarative**

**  
** Here— how do you want me to say it  
without really saying it,   
because saying it makes it real, see,   
and I don’t know if you’re reaching back.

The first way is that—   
I am reaching out. 

The second is  
I had a dream you got lost  
and it was a nightmare.

Third,  
I read the words you’ve sent me  
like bedtime stories I am too old for.   
I have slept more in the past few months   
than in most of the rest of my life.

For a fourth,   
I wonder what forever feels like.   
I think you could show me.

I hope I'm not wrong, about all the things we haven't been saying. Cause I still don't know how to end that poem. 

Yours, as always, 

Anakin

[Letter]

Dearest Anakin, 

Here’s another story; indulge me one more of them. This one isn’t real, but it is true. 

Imagine an old, abandoned house in the woods. The best kind of abandoned house. Someone just got up and left it there, but it hasn’t been sitting for too long. Everything is structurally sound and nothing is rotting. You can walk around it to your heart's content. It sits there, dignified, the lock rusted out. 

Inside that house is a boy with red hair. He broke in, because he likes doing such things. He has battered shoes and a backpack from the army surplus store. He is very alone, and he is in the house to pretend that he isn’t. 

Outside, another boy walks up to the house. He’s a bit younger. Probably already taller. Skateboard under his arm, hair in a tangle, and an impressive black eye. 

Probably, he has come here because he is running away from something. A house filled to suffocation with a man he wishes his mother never married. A school filled with teachers who are waiting on him to fail. Pressure to be better, but no idea how to manifest the potential everyone keeps telling him he has. 

Most likely, he sits on the stoop, and does not go inside. The red-headed boy probably thinks about just waiting until he leaves, not say anything at all— but something tells him to do something else, instead.

He walks out of the house. He startles the boy on the stoop, which is a wonderful first impression, I’m sure. 

Maybe they don’t like each other at first. Maybe they connect immediately. Whatever the case, they talk for a time, and then they walk away. 

But they meet there again. Back to that old house. Together, away from the rest of the world. They grow up together there. And they talk about their problems, there. And neither of them needs to be alone anymore. 

You see what I mean, when I say that it isn’t real. But I’ve been thinking about it, recently. How different it would have been if we knew each other for years. Because it already feels like I’ve known you for years. And I wonder if those two boys would have helped each other this much, back then.

Which is to say this; the child I was would have adored the child you were as much as I adore you now.

I cannot believe we lived in the same world for all that time, and only met a year ago. Can you imagine— I was just walking around my own life, never knowing where you were. On each one of our worst days, the other one existed someplace far away. And I wish that I could have been with you, on all your worst days, but at the same time I am so grateful for the version of you I got to meet once we finally collided. 

Writing to you has been an exercise in finding myself again. But when I went looking for me, I found you there, too; sitting in front of that imaginary abandoned house, next to the specter of the little boy who ripped himself out of me when my father died. As if you’d always been there. Were always meant to be there. 

Please, imagine that house again. And now imagine that it’s been fixed. The windows have glass in them. The walls have been painted. Because you helped me have the courage to do that.

You told me that you were ready to stop running. 

Anakin, Anakin— the door is unlocked. The door is open. 

Please, come inside.

All my love, always,

Obi-Wan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter up tomorrow, friends :))))


	13. September (Again)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> September: Coming Home

.

The door to Obi-Wan’s house had been repainted, sometime in the past year. It was a brighter red than it was before. 

Or, maybe, Anakin simply remembered the door wrong. He’d only seen it the once, after all. 

Anakin’s palm sweated around the phone he had clutched in his hand as he walked up the front path. The last of the summer heat sat heavy and lazy around him. A vague thought entered his head, that the phone would slip out of his hand and shatter on the walkway, and that Obi-Wan’s second first impression of him would be a cursing mess trying to pick up shattered pieces of glass off of concrete. 

The gutters on the house sagged less than they had a year ago. Anakin could start ticking off the changes to the inside on his fingers. Obi-Wan wrote about all of them.

Anakin read the letters far too many times to forget. 

And then, much too quickly, he was standing in front of the bright red door. His backpack slid off his shoulder, and he let it. He caught the strap in his other hand, and took a deep breath over his pounding heart. 

Anakin raised a fist to knock on the door. 

It opened before he could. 

Obi-Wan Kenobi, in the flesh, stared back at him. Gray eyes wide. Lips slightly parted. 

Anakin noticed, after a year of absence, little physical things that either changed, or been forgotten, or that he never noticed in the first place. A freckle by the corner of the eye. A thread of gray by the temple. The way he held himself, as if his left hip hurt, just a little bit. 

Obi-Wan being a physical presence, instead of one of abstraction, of words, of longing, was nearly too much to bear. 

Anakin opened his mouth to say something, and found— there was nothing there. No words left or needed. He found that everything important had already been said.

A silence grew between them, but it wasn’t really silence. It was realizing how deeply they’d already sank into the marrow of each other’s bones. 

How could he say _“I missed you,”_ when he’d let this person so close that _missing_ had somehow both become something constant and never occurred to him? How could he say _“hello,”_ when every day of the past year had been that greeting repeated to the pounding of his hearts?

Finally, Anakin spoke. “So, it worked?” 

Obi-Wan twitched up a smile. It made the edges of his eyes crinkle, welcoming and warm. 

He asked, “What worked?” and hearing his voice in person made the backpack slide from Anakin’s hand. It landed on the ground with a _thud._ Neither of them noticed. 

“The experiment,” said Anakin. “The thing I said. Last year. That, maybe in a year, if we wrote to each other, we would end up in love.”

Obi-Wan’s smile grew. It was sweet and golden. Honey and home. He reached out his hand, and Anakin reached back without thought. Their fingers slide together, like keys in locks, the compass rose of a map, the final word needed to complete a verse. 

“I really have missed you terribly,” said Obi-Wan. “Please, come in.”

And Obi-Wan pulled Anakin over the threshold and into the house. 

The End.

_Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed,  
_ _under my necktie and just above my heart,  
_ _a certain pang of grief between the ribs,  
_ _you were gone that quickly._

_I needed the light of your energy,  
_ _I looked around, devouring hope.  
_ _I watched the void without you that is like a house,  
_ _nothing left but tragic windows._

_Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens  
_ _to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,  
_ _to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned;  
_ _so I wait for you like a lonely house_  
_till you will see me again and live in me.  
Till then my windows ache._

— Pablo Neruda, Sonnet LXV (translated by Stephen Tapscott)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I. Cannot believe I finished this. Holy shit. I have never in my entire life finished a longfic, I am going to Scream. 
> 
> Final word count on this 23k, and I am very proud of myself. 
> 
> Probably, in the next few weeks, I will be posting a bonus chapter 14, which will basically be a glossary of the references I used to both poets and pop culture, with a little write up about why I used them, ect. But as for the main plot of this, we are Finished, my friends. 
> 
> A huge thank you again to Eli, who enabled and cheerlead-ed this from the start and without whom I probably would not have even started. I hope this was the epistolary softness you were imagining when I first pitched the concept <3 
> 
> And thank you to all of you, who went along with this self-indulgent nonsense. I hope you enjoyed!! You all mean the world to me. 
> 
> I am [on tumblr,](https://ghostwriterofthemachine.tumblr.com/l) though I am not very active. Feel free to come say hi, though! 
> 
> Have such a good day, everyone! Be well <3

**Author's Note:**

> Most chapters from here on out will be social media posts and letters. Thank you for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] i wait for you (like a empty house)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28656060) by [shatou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shatou/pseuds/shatou)




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